Etsy has had "significant difficulty" processing transactions since July 1, likely as a result of a bug in the system of Worldpay, Etsy's processor, according to sources who spoke with Bloomberg and TechCrunch.

As a result, all orders paid with a credit, debit, or gift card are taking several hours or days to process, though PayPal transactions reportedly remain unaffected.

The vast majority of Etsy merchants have received zero or delayed payments for nearly a week, with no identified time frame for a fix. It's worth noting that this is the second such Worldpay outage on Etsy — the site suffered similar difficulties around Valentine's Day, but saw a faster resolution.

In a competitive gateway ecosystem, this could be hugely threatening to Etsy and Worldpay. Worldpay is reportedly Etsy's main processor, which means that until the issue is resolved, merchants don't have an alternative for credit, debit, and gift card processing. That could have two implications:

Merchants could build their own shops instead of selling on Etsy. With products like Stripe or Square's eCommerce API, it's now relatively simple for merchants to set up and begin processing digital payments on their own. That could cause some Etsy merchants to shift to other gateways, though it's worth noting that this could be unlikely because of merchants' reliance on Etsy as a distribution channel.

Etsy could select a new provider and leave Worldpay. That could be quite costly for Worldpay, considering that Etsy processed roughly $2.4 billion in sales in 2015, which could account for up to 2% of Worldpay's global e-commerce volume, based on Worldpay sales data.